Microsoft has quietly released a recovery image for Surface RT tablets rendered unusable by bugs in last week's upgrade to Windows RT 8.1.
The image can be downloaded here, along with a short instruction sheet explaining how to create a bootable recovery drive using any PC running Windows 7 or later and any USB drive larger than …

Re: Serves you right

Re: Serves you right

Re: Deity grade output

"If everyone behaved as you do then we would ALL be in a sorry state...."

Wrong!!!!! No, Mr. I Missed the Point, we would not have software / firmware "releases" that qualify as Beta grade because developers would DEBUG IT WELL THEMSELVES RATHER THAN LOOK FOR CUSTOMER FEEDBACK TO DO IT.

Re: Deity grade output

@◘AC 05:00

I think you will find that it is an almost impossible task to completely debug any application, above a certain complexity, which is 100% fit for the general public.

It it the market that defines the necessity for ever increasing updates, service packs and versions. This increase creates the terrible situation of reducing software quality. It's easy to spot, all of the big players are guilty of it, MS, Apple, Google and even linux to a certain extent.

If I addition the amount of downtime that I have had in the last 20 years it would add up to a tiny tiny percentage of the uptime, I find this more than acceptable... Maybe you require 100% uptime, in that case write your own dsoftware, when you are finished writing it, we will see how you fare.

Unfortunately, with a world moving more and more to tablets, this is going to be an issue for the future to deal with. I know entire households that have basically thrown the old computer paradigm out with the old computer and now exist solely on smartphones and tablets, no PC to actually make the bootable drives. It has looked for a while that the humble home service tech was an industry that was simply going to vanish, now I see some hope, if the tablets require a PC to make a recovery disk, and no one except your local friendly service tech actually owns a PC or laptop the industry does indeed look bright.

Luckily you can quite easily make a USB recovery drive from a Surface RT. :-) The procedure is reasonably widely documented, as I think a fair few people do it to free up a few GB of the internal storage. (Note that an alternative to hunting for it in Control Panel is to just type "recovery" on the Start Screen.)

I believe I was prompted to do it as part of the process of installing the 8.1 Preview. I actually used the recovery image to go back to 8.0 before installing 8.1 RTM. It turned out to be surprisingly quick (not actually *quick*, you understand, but quicker than I was expecting for "reinstall OS from image on USB2 stick".)

Not sure what you're supposed to do with an iPad, unless you live near an Apple Store. What about android devices? Any way to create a recovery image for them? I'm genuinely interested, now.